I used to work in a corporate pizza chain. Not as a manager, but as a cook. The guy who gets dirty, burned, and underappreciated. I emphasize the "corporate" part because, despite making incredibly good pizza, it was turning into a corporate cult. I stayed there for four years, working long hours for low pay because I loved pizza so much. The managers would make big displays out of how submissive they were to higher-level managers. I even called some of them the "big bad bootlickers." One manager got so angry at me he called me the A-word right in front of other employees.

An emphasis on corporateness is often a harbinger of bad things to come. My last winter there, it was announced that we cooks were to have another task dumped on us to relieve the workloads of other departments: we had to handwash the metal heat sinks that we put into the inch-thick pizzas to make them cook faster. This was a VERY time-consuming practice that caused us to have to stay late. Both of my managers gave me the same reason for me having to do this: "If you don't do it, we won't get our bonuses."

I didn't last much longer than that. I moved on to become a real chef elsewhere. The A-word guy eventually quit in frustration at his job. The restaurant went out of business a few years later, and a knockoff chain has taken its place.

Right out of college I got hired into a smallish software company as a sort of assistant-to-the-development-manager. It was my job to help streamline processes, write documentation guidelines, create a documentation website to contain and keep updated by developers all software process docs, requirement docs, etc. My boss (the manager of software development) had been hired just months before me.

Turns out before that, there was NO manager. Everyone reported to the micro-managing CEO directly. There were no requirements processes, it was all very ad hoc. This caused them to be eternally late delivering software and in turn lose money.

After only 4 months on the job and promises from the CEO that we would be profitable, there were layoffs for not being profitable.

Two of those laid off?

Myself and the Development manager. Nothing like a company going back to what was making them lose money.
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I worked for four years in one of the largest companies in the US witnessed or experienced my own version of just about every horror story written here but there was one that always stuck out as particularly cruel and horrible.

I worked on a production support team that was partner to a 5-man team that did bug fixes and programmed patches. The bug team consisted of several high-paid, long-time company people with masters degrees in vague things like "computer science". Most of them were actually pretty talented guys, but they had become extremely complacent and lazy.

Enter "contractor guy" from another country who was here on work visa. He was a genius, worked extremely hard, was very nice, pretty much never made a mistake and never said no to anything he was asked to do, even if it wasn't his job.

In about a year, this guy was doing all the work of the 4 of the 5 full time employees. They would come in late, leave early, defer any questions to him. They had an on-call rotation but if you paged one of the other dudes during their week, somehow contractor guy still ended up being the one staying up until 2am fixing the problem with you.

After about a year, management decided not to renew contractor guy's contract, to, and I quote "light a fire under the *** of his team, so they don't think they can just rely on one person". That'll show them, hold on to your 5 useless employees and fire the guy doing all the work. He ended up having to go back to his country and he even spent 3 months documenting everything he did. The other 5 dudes could not even be bothered to read what he'd wrote and learn what he did.

Not long after, I left this company and started my own business; I just could not be a part of something like that.
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As a fresh graduate to a big company, I was eager to learn all I could to facilitate my rise up the corporate ladder. There was one manager in particular who impressed me: he was smart, ruthless, and half the company was scared of him. I watched him carefully for tips I could use in my own career.

One day, many months later, I went into the bathroom and there he was: standing slouched at the urinal, chin almost on chest, fiddling with his penis. In that moment I learned a crucial lesson: nobody can respect you when you look like that. From then on I have always made sure I stood tall at the trough.
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A few years back I was recruited into management for a not-for-profit organization.

The CEO was a lovely lady, but short on leadership insight (read "clueless"). She called us in groups into head office (20 minutes drive each way) for a "special meeting," which lasted 10 minutes and was about nothing that couldn't have been easily emailed.

We figured out that she wasted a whole lot of time with three groups having to go at different times.

Then she hired a consultant to help develop the company's "vision and mission." Twenty-five staff were taken out of active duty for two full days, but by the end nothing had been developed.

Funny thing is she's considered to be a local mover and shaker in the business community!
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